Why I Hate October

I started off the morning by thinking of my dad. It's exactly a week until the anniversary of his suicide. For some reason, I was reminded of an incident that took place when I was around six. I'm thinking six because I started school when I was seven and I know it happened before I was in school.

I was quite precocious, I guess. Before he died, my father told me that he was so amazed that, even when I was two or three, I would answer questions like an adult. I suspect a lot of that was related to survival instinct. My parents used to get these workbooks that purported to teach various subjects. I had already completed all of the first grade work and had progressed to the second or third grade. Unfortunately, I had reached my limit. Maybe under different circumstances I could have been successful at higher grade levels, but I don't think so. My memories of childhood tend to focus on one aspect of an event; this is a ptsd symptom. My recollection was of sitting at the dining room table with one of those workbooks (math, i think) and being completely unable to complete the work. That made my dad very angry with me. I just remember that he yelled and hit me, left the room while I attempted to complete the work. As I said before, I was unable to complete it, so he kept coming in and hitting me and yelling at me. I can't say how long all of that went on, but in my child's sense of time, it went on for a very long time.

It's incidents like this that make the anniversary of his death so difficult. Despite his paranoia and sadism, he was the only father I will ever have and I did love him. I get bombarded by all of these bad memories, followed by memories of how I felt I failed him as a daughter. I wish I could have saved him from himself, but if I had been there at the time, I fear there would have been two others dead--my mother and me. The idea that I could save my father from his mental illness is absurd, but he was kind enough to instill in me a sense of responsibility for him. I was also responsible for my mother, too, and just as unable to really help her. Days like today are filled with self-recrimination. I'm very sad today. I still have a week to get through. It's going to be a long week.